Roman Empire (Hadrianic)

Arrian

The historian of Alexander

Lifespan · c. 86 – c. 160 CE

A Greek in the Roman world

Arrian was a Greek of the Roman imperial period — born in Bithynia, educated as a philosopher, and risen to the heights of the Roman state as a senator, consul, and governor of Cappadocia under the emperor Hadrian, where he commanded armies against the nomad Alani. The platform reads him as a characteristic and impressive figure of the second-century synthesis of Greek learning and Roman power: a man who was at once a serious historian, a practising Stoic, and a Roman general and administrator. The breadth is the point — like his model Xenophon, Arrian united the life of action and the life of the mind.

The historian of Alexander

The platform reads Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander as his great achievement and the single most valuable surviving account of Alexander's conquests. Consciously taking Xenophon as his literary model — even echoing the title of Xenophon's Anabasis — he applied rigorous source-criticism to the mass of Alexander legend, building his narrative on the lost first-hand memoirs of Alexander's officers Ptolemy and Aristobulus. The platform reads this under historical method: Arrian is the historian who recovered the sober, military, historical Alexander from the romance that had grown around him.

The keeper of Epictetus

The platform reads Arrian's other great service as philosophical. As a young man he attended the lectures of the Stoic ex-slave Epictetus and took them down; the Discourses and the Handbook (Enchiridion) that he compiled are the only record we have of Epictetus' teaching, and through them Epictetus shaped the Stoicism of, among others, the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The platform reads this as a remarkable double legacy: the same man preserved both the best history of the greatest conqueror and the teaching of the philosopher who most shaped the Stoic tradition of self-command.

Why the platform reads him

Arrian is the platform's primary historian for Alexander and a bridge among several of its central concerns — Greek learning and Roman power, history and philosophy, the conqueror and the Stoic. The platform reads him as the exemplary critical historian of the Alexander tradition, and develops his method and his importance in Arrian and the Alexander tradition.

Related reading

theme
Historical method
The ancient — chiefly Greek and Roman — inquiry into how history should be written, what kinds of evidence are admissible, what explanation the historian owes the reader, and what the proper relation is between the writer's experience and the events being described.
theme
Empire-Building
The act of forging a multi-ethnic dominion by conquest and consolidation — the problem Alexander posed and his successors inherited, of how to turn a sweep of victories into a governable, durable state.
theme
Military Command
The practical art of leading armed men — discipline, logistics, morale, the management of fear and fatigue — which Xenophon, uniquely among the philosophers, knew from the inside as an elected general of the Ten Thousand.
book
The Anabasis of Alexander
Arrian's history of Alexander's campaigns — the best and most reliable surviving account, written in the second century CE on the lost memoirs of Alexander's own officers Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the foundation of the sober historical Alexander.
philosopher
Alexander the Great
The Macedonian king whose thirteen-year conquest of the Achaemenid world remade the political and cultural map of the eastern Mediterranean and Iran — and whose afterlife in the European tradition has not stopped being read as the working case of unprecedented personal power.
philosopher
Xenophon
Athenian soldier, historian and student of Socrates — author of the Anabasis, the Hellenica, the Cyropaedia and the Socratic works that sit alongside Plato's as our second main witness to Socrates.
philosopher
Marcus Aurelius
The Stoic on the throne — the last of the Five Good Emperors, author of the Meditations, and the platform's central test case for whether virtue and supreme power can be held in the same hands, and at what cost to both.
civilization
Hellenistic World
Three centuries of Greek-speaking imperial monarchies that followed Alexander's conquest of the Achaemenid Persian world — the political and cultural substrate the Roman world would inherit and the Christian east would eventually grow out of.
essay
Arrian and the Alexander tradition
An interpretive reading of how the historical Alexander reaches us through Arrian — his source-criticism, his reliance on the eyewitness memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the wider problem of the Alexander tradition.
essay
Why Alexander succeeded
An interpretive reading of the causes of Alexander's success — the inherited army, his generalship and personal leadership, his speed and daring, and the boundless ambition that drove him to the edge of the known world.